A Letter from the Editor

Adam Ross

03/2020

March 16, 2020

Dear Readers of the Sewanee Review,

If you’re living through the current pandemic as I am, perhaps the most salient fact of the experience is how fast everything is changing. It’s hard to recall much about yesterday when three days before that your children’s spring break was extended, then the next day their school closed, then your university closed. (Or you were laid off. Or were stuck far from home.) All chronology seems to have shattered. If we ride through life each on our own little ships, then the weather at sea is decidedly turbulent and foggy. In our wake, each minute it seems, previously comforting systems go tumbling, and then disappear in the haze, immediately forgotten. From the prow, where our eyes are directed, other systems suddenly come whipping toward us, out of nowhere, and are gone. You give up asking how long this will last. There seems to only be the now.

And if you’re living through the current pandemic as I am, you feel, very acutely, what a very brilliant friend of mine described as “adjacent authority.” Absent consistent messages from local, state, and federal governments, we ask the person nearest to us: what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it, to somehow triangulate our own actionable response.

Which gets to this notion of “nearest,” or “nearness.” Since I’m writing this on a mountain, and from a remote place, I’m on the phone a lot, talking to those near and dear to me. Last Thursday—I think it was Thursday—I was talking with one of our contributors, Lea Carpenter, who lives in Manhattan and had heard from a well-connected friend that New York’s mayor was going to close the public school system, the largest in the nation. Having grown up in Manhattan and gone to public school myself, this idea, this decision, with all of its cascading social and economic consequences, stunned me into near immobility.

I’m a jiujitsu athlete, and in that sport as in my life as an editor and writer, I live by the following mantra: Flow with the go. So I immediately reached out to our contributors, as well as other thoughtful people I know, and asked them to write me about what they were seeing from their vantage point as this crisis unfolds. I thought we’d call their responses the Corona Correspondences. The rationale was to give you, our readers, something to enjoy that’s fresh and daily and, I hope, encouraging and affirming, since these missives or letters or dispatches should make you feel less isolated in isolation. These letters are acts of freedom, fellowship, and charity. In lieu of payment, our authors have agreed to allow us to make purchases or donations to local nonprofits in our correspondents' local communities. We list those as well, at the end of each letter, to give you the option of furthering their contribution.

Below you will find an ongoing archive of these Corona Correspondences, which we will continue to update for as long as we receive them. I hope you share these. I hope they’re a comfort.

Meanwhile, here at the Review, we are doing what we can to make your isolation more bearable, to increase a safe sense of nearness. First, we’ll be releasing our podcasts at a much faster clip than was planned. Second, we’ll be sharing more material from our archive. Third, we’ll continue to publish on schedule. Watch for notifications from us about this. The Spring issue will be available online on March 30th. Meanwhile, we’re editing Summer 2020, at an acceptable social distance from each other.

Stay in touch. Be good to each other. Help those in need. Flow with the go.

Read More

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To buy time, Nel took the rabbit into the bathroom. How much was the thing worth? she wondered. She knew O’s moms had heritage breeds, and that many were considered endangered. Or threatened, at least. Now, seeing the animal in better light, she determined that it had been white. Blue eyes. Ears oddly stiff and upright. It looked more like a duster than a once-living creature.

I think, to be—you can characterize your reception of the emotion, reader—terrified by it, or appalled. Frost had wanted to dramatize a bitter truth. Wyatt wants to contain it by gathering it to the larger rhythms the work gathers us to.